It's that time of the week again, Azure time. I'm Lars Klint,
and this is Azure This Week. Now, since I saw you last,
I've been turning over any cloud I've come across to make sure you only get the
best cloud news from Microsoft.
And I found a new Azure certification,
a massive attack on Azure, and some more Function features.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, we got AZ-800 and 801?
I spoke to Orin Thomas about it,
and I thought that was the last major certification we would see for a while.
Well, not so.
This week we've got news of AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure
Solutions. At the same time,
we found out that the current AZ-303 and 304 will retire on the
31st of March, 2022.
The main question of gotten so far about the exam is what if I've already passed
AZ-303, but not 304. Well, you have two choices.
Either take AZ-305 or AZ-304 before
31st of March next year.
Both options will earn you the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification.
If you're planning on taking 303 and 304,
but you don't have AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate,
then you need to get moving.
You will not be allowed to take AZ-305 without 104.
So in short to earn Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification,
you need AZ-104 and 305 or 303 and 305
or 303 and 304.
Now why one new exam to replace the two old ones? For one,
the exam seems to become more refined as Microsoft learns how they relate to
real-world roles. AZ-100 and 101 became 103,
200 and 201 became 203 and so on. And secondly,
the exams do need constant review and, at times, updates to stay relevant.
And this is definitely not the last time we've seen certification updates. Now,
if you're super eager,
the new AZ-305 exam will be available in beta from 16th of
November, 2021. Well, that's not far off.
If you'd like to learn more about getting cloud certified,
check out ACG's free plan.
It gives you access to free courses and quizzes,
plus learning paths and original series content like this one.
And you don't need a credit card to sign up.
We'll be sure to include a link in the description below.
In the first half of 2021 there were reported 25%
increase in Denial-of-service attacks on Azure compared to Q4 of
2020. And this week,
we then learned of the biggest single DDoS attack on Azure.
In the last week of August,
a 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack on a European
customer was detected.
This is 140% higher than 2020s 1 Tbps attack and
higher than any network volume metric event previously detected on Azure.
The traffic originated from approximately 70,000 sources and from multiple
countries in the Asia Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan,
and China, as well as the US. As I mentioned last week on the show,
there was some pretty serious DDoS protection measures on Azure,
and they also deflected the attack this time. So how did Azure do this?
Well, in this case attack traffic,
which originated in the Asia Pacific region and the US,
did not reach the customer region,
but was instead mitigated at the source countries.
Azure identified the attack and stopped the traffic before it even got to the
destination. Now,
I think it's very cool that cloud computing can be used both to scale
applications massively,
as well as protect from attacks to the extent that we never even noticed.
And finally, another piece of Azure Function news.
This week dynamic concurrency was released in a public preview.
Dynamic concurrency can improve the performance of your applications by
optimizing the throughput for each instance and make real-time adjustments to
your concurrency settings as your load patterns change over time.
As opposed to static concurrency for Azure Functions,
the dynamic model can provide a much simpler configuration as the system
sort of learns the optimal values for your workload over time.
You also get healthier instances as they are less likely to take on too many
tasks and then get overloaded. Now,
if you have Azure Functions that run a lot,
then this could be an improvement to the performance of your applications.
So try it out today. Or now, or do it now.
Go. Before I wrap up,
I wanted to mention that the Introduction to Azure Security course is free all
this month on the A Cloud Guru platform.
This course is a great way to get the right start to Azure security.
To check it out, hit the free plan sign up link below.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team when we were just about to settle in for a
smooth end to the year with no new certifications,
"Seek, and you shall cloud".
So see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.